Your personal sense of justice is typically experienced as a “feeling” that something is just not right. You probably find yourself ruminating about all the different ways that you did not deserve to be treated in one way or another. There are likely several times in your life where you may experience niggling sensations that situations or people are taking you for granted or mis-treating you. These are the times that you must listen to what you are feeling and to unpack your did I deserve that impulse more deeply.
Whenever you are stopped in your tracks at home, community, or in the workplace by experiences that make you wonder if you deserved that, your internal justice-compass has been activated or triggered. It is important to trust what you are feeling, even where you may or may not be mis-interpreting or mis-perceiving events. Your feelings will help you to further understand what about certain situations are rubbing you the wrong way.
Sometimes, these initial feelings are activated by core wounds that every person has deeply embedded in the unconscious mind. Core wounds are best understood as early childhood relational trauma inadvertently caused by parenting or child-minding practices that fail to meet the child’s emotional needs. In horrible cases, some early childhood trauma results from abusive parents or other adult caregivers who hurt children. But in most cases, core wounds are caused by normative parenting that is experienced by a child’s unmet emotional need as relational trauma – why aren’t you making me feel better?
It is only when you are solidly adulting that you begin to ask how do I make myself feel better in this situation. Where parents accept that they can only try to get reading their child’s emotional needs right, the better off everyone will be. Preverbal children communicate emotional and physical pain in the same way, and it is one of the most stressful experiences in life to settle an unhappy infant or preverbal child. There are many things that happen over the course of the day that trigger your inner child. So, accept that your sad and unhappy wounded inner child will be activated while adulting.
It is generally expected that adults can talk their way through problems. We ought to expect less from children according to their ages and ability to communicate effectively. Most children grow more sophisticated in problem solving skills as their language abilities develop. Some adults never truly harness this ability to solve problems verbally. You probably have memories of people at work or in your community who tantrum in response to problems instead of engaging in conversation about ways to move forward together. It is reasonable to view these reactions as childish and immature especially in professional workplace environments. As you learn to exercise your choices in life, your capacity to nurture and address your own inner child becomes easier. In fact, an excellent measure of maturity is this ability to meet your own emotional needs and to regulate your feelings independent of external factors that trigger childhood emotional injury.
Some of you are also wondering if the did I deserve that impulse signifies whether you are acting childish, sucky, or entitled in response to a problem situation at home or work. This is a good question to ask yourself and to explore honestly from your “all grown-up” adult standpoint. You may find that in fact your standards about how people behave are set too high. It is possible that the now did I deserve that signifies a faulty self-concept of being special or more deserving than others. This idea is also worth exploring further as you may struggle with accepting the inherent worth of all persons equally. Where you hold the view that you are more important or special than those in your workplace, you run the risk of internalizing decisions that ought not be taken personally.
On the other hand, an honest exploration of the did I deserve that impulse may reveal more troubling aspects about your relationships with people in your life. You might identify that certain people in your life dismiss humiliate or offend you on a regular basis. You might identify that some of the people in your world express a particularly triggering discourse that challenges your choice to work with them. There may be times where values in a work context simply no longer align with your personal points of view. Where this mis-alignment between shared values occurs in the workplace, the risk for workplace trauma increases. A risk of relationship trauma also increases in romantic relationships when you discover that your partner or spouse knowingly behaves in ways that trigger core emotional wounds related to lying and dishonesty, or abandonment and rejection. Discovering repetitive patterns of emotional abuse after honestly asking for a change in behaviour is toxic and often the main reason couples cannot repair problems.
The now, did I deserve that impulse becomes most powerful when it helps to discern if your workplace or romantic relationships are indeed healthy for you. It may take some time with a professional counsellor or psychotherapist for you to unpack what is really going on for you, and whether your feelings are related to historic pain or current problems. In my professional experience, everyday problems trigger old wounds that beckon for healing. Either way, your impulse to question the impact of people’s words, behaviours, and decisions on how you feel is deeply significant and as such, worthy of your attention.
Enjoy the journey of self-discovery and all that it has to offer!
Happy Easter
by Lisa Romano-Dwyer PhD, RSW
